Tuesday, 26 February 2008

Science is uncovering the myriad causal pathways that lead to us to behave the way we do, and it seems free will isn't one of them. Where does that leave people's sense of moral responsibility? Under threat, is the answer from Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler. Their new study shows that students exposed to arguments against the existence of free will are more likely to cheat.

Thirty students answered maths problems on a computer. A feigned technical glitch meant that they had to press the space bar each question to stop the computer from giving the answers away. Crucially, before the test, half the students read a passage from the late Francis Crick's book about consciousness, in which he argues that free will is an illusion. These students pressed the space bar less often than the students who hadn't read about free will - in other words, they cheated more.

In a second experiment, dozens of students were exposed to either pro free will, anti free will or neutral statements prior to performing a series of mental tests. Afterwards, the students were allowed to score their own answers, shred them for anonymity, and then award themselves a dollar for each correct answer. The students previously exposed to anti free will messages awarded themselves significantly more money than the other students, probably because they cheated more. It's unlikely they had truly performed better. Two further groups of students, one of which was also exposed to anti free will statements, had their answers marked by the researchers and neither of them performed as well as the first group of anti free will students claimed to have done.

6 comments:

These findings really annoy me, especially their conclusion: 'We must insulate the public against deterministic messages'. Not: 'It's imperative that people learn to think for themselves; learn how to reason; to think long-range; to see that it's in their own best interest to live in a society that upholds human rights; that their own actions affects their self-esteem and so it's in their own best interests to act ethically - if they choose not to, then their integrity, which is essential for healthy self-esteem, will suffer.

I also see the experiments as grossly flawed: telling people beforehand that they don't have freewill does not mean that humans don't have it; it simply means that 45 years after Stanley Milgram first conducted his 'Obedience to Authority' experiment, people still don't think for themselves. All it says is, the subjects didn't stop to question an authority figure, didn't stop to ask to see these 'experiments proving we don't have freewill'; or for the second experiment, stop and reason about whether these messages they were receiving were rational or not.

Of course people feel that they have less control over their lives; the government treats them like helpless dependents who need some big authority (read adult figure), to protect them - and not volitional beings who are capable of taking care of themselves. Volition, the ability to think long-range and independence are, after all, what distinguishes children from adults. Protecting the public from deterministic messages isn't helping the public, it's simply reinforcing this infantile behaviour. What actually needs to happen is a return to reason.

The researchers also haven't addressed the correlation between people feeling less in control of their lives and the increase in cheating; if people don't feel efficacious (because they haven't made the transition to adulthood and what this entails), then they're probably more likely to cheat - what alternative do they have, if they believe their own actions won't procure the desired results?

If people need protecting from anything, it's from social psychologists who disseminate the belief that adults are incapable of looking after themselves.

It's amusing that these powerful think tanks fail to understand that the whole idea of free will is flawed. They don't even define the very thing that they are attempting to debunk. Acting with free will does not mean the absence of a "cause" for our actions, but rather it means that our actions align with our intentions as propelled by our beliefs and values. Our human nature leads us to have a tendency towards pleasure and an aversion to pain - not just physical but emotional, psychological and in ways we may not properly express through words. However, this foundation leads to a moral sense that we are all challenged to act in accordance with. This study certainly proves what we all know - that people can be influenced. However, I would argue that this study actually demonstrates free will since the responders actually changed behaviour based on new information. If they didn't have free will, they would produce the same results regardless of the information that they received.

Wow. I am starting to lose faith either in psychological research or how it is popularised. How does this in anyway relate to whether settled nornally deterministic people act? I am used to this 'atheist determinists are clearly evil' bunk from my fundamentalist neighbors but not ostensibly scientific sources.